Gunvald Larsson sits carefully observing the dingy Stockholm apartment of a man under police surveillance. He looks at his watch: nine minutes past eleven in the evening. At that same moment, the house explodes, killing at least three people. Chief Inspector Martin Beck and his men don't suspect arson or murder until they discover a peculiar circumstance linking the explosion to a suicide committed that same day. The dead man left a note consisting of just two words: Martin Beck. This is the excellent next installment of the genre-pioneering Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s, widely recognized as the greatest masterpieces of crime fiction ever written.

The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because, for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain, a regulation fire truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what, if anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a forty-six-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: "Martin Beck"?